How can you tell if an IDE cable is bad?

[AShadeOfClear]

When an IDE cable goes bad, are there always clear signs, like crashes, errors reading files, and the like?

If not, and the cable is in fact bad, could there be a real possibility of screwing up your data during copying, or make it somehow "corrupt"?

 

[Adul]

a bad ide cable will do funky things. change it and find out if it was bad or not.

 

[spanky]

try another ide cablle or two on the same ide controller. thats how i troubleshoot ide cables.

 

[pillage2001]

data corruption is one of them.

 

[PoosodDirt]

Some symptoms can be reading/writing errors, data cooruption, fatal disc error, etc. You'll only know it's the cable if you swap it with a new one.

 

[AShadeOfClear]

I see.

This may be a long shot, but is there an ide cable testing program or device available?

 

[nemo160]

http://www.twstore.com/t-11.html
ribbon cable tester
unfortuneatley its over $250
just try swapping the cables

 

[AShadeOfClear]

Yeah I'll switch cables.

This one looks really neat though

 

[PoosodDirt]

Dish out $250 for a cable tester or get a $5 cable. It's a no brainer.

 

[Odoacer]

Well, 250 dolla might be worth it if a LOT of cables go bad on you... but since thats pretty unlikely, i say buy another cable

 

[nemo160]

this is the one i was talking about
hella cool but can't really justify it unless you own a shop or are it guy for a company with a bunch of computers
really cool and quite useful...but us enthusiasts are pretty much stuck with cable swapping

 

[nemo160]

Hobbbes USA makes that one..i pulled up their page and it seems like they have a pretty good range of cable testers.
One of those testers would pay for itself pretty quickly dealing with some of the more expensive scsi cables.
Interesting, but not practical in this case.